Everything around it was straight Jargon, so I take it that the phrase was borrowed wholesale from everyday English.

Plus, the dictionary I’ve made of all the Indian-written shorthand CJ letters found, has “yir” (iir) as a normal word for “year”.

But you could say it in what could be called comparatively pure Chinook Jargon, something like “Kloshe Chee Cole” or “Kloshe Chee Cole Illahee”. That’d be written łúsh chxí khúl Grand Ronde-style.

(Please excuse as I shake with helpless laughter. My 4-year-old is sitting on my lap, and she’s ordering me to type a “crapital” letter.)

But there are time when we have to shake off our sense of what “sounds like real Chinook”, and humbly acknowledge that our ancestors didn’t always say every single thing using words that only existed in Jargon.

I’ll bet a jug of hooligan grease that someone has coined a new way to say “Happy New Year” in CJ. That’s important for our world of revitalizers to hear about. We need one-line new year’s blessings at the ready, so we don’t feel stumped about how to express such a commonplace sentiment.